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Doug Saunders

The world is running out of food

People no longer doubt, as they did 40 years ago, that the world is capable of producing enough food for all of humanity, even if our numbers grow to nine billion. We know it can, and we know how to make it happen. Farms in Africa and the Indian subcontinent – where the land is fertile and the growing season long – should be producing much more food than their European counterparts. Instead, India produces half as much per hectare, and Africa hardly anything. They could easily feed the world.

This isn’t hard to solve, and farmers know what’s needed: better transport and market infrastructure, new seeds engineered for their climates and needs, an end to subsidies and trade barriers, a shift from survival-based to commercial farming practices. And these things are being done (in part because farming is suddenly profitable), albeit too slowly. This decade may well be remembered as the unfortunate gap between the first Green Revolution (which ended mass famines and widespread Asian starvation in the 1970s) and the second (which is poised to make even bigger changes in Africa and Asia). Until supply catches up to demand, we have a crisis.

What stands in the way, this time as last time, is misunderstanding. Aid organizations in the West and governments in the developing world, motivated by myths of village tranquillity, pay people to stay rural rather than to consolidate their holdings and modernize their farming.

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Well,
I’m thinking that the old “Victory Garden” in your front and/or back yard might assist.

Of course, watch out for the Homeowner’s Association Nazis! Make sure you use flowering veggies, not corn stalks.

We have a lot of “ground cover” composed of herbs at our place. And this Spring we’ll be planting a few things behind the privacy fence.

Be ready. Be prepared. Dec 21 wasn’t the end of the world. But Liberals are doing their best to set a date for the death of independence and the dearth of resources that happens when people become dependent.

So a farmer in Africa works his ass off all year to produce enough crops so he can take them to market. When he gets there, there is a big truck marked UN offloading tons of crops and giving them away for free. Gee, I wonder why the most fertile land in the world is not farmed more heavily.

There is, always has been, and always will be only one feasible solution to the problem of “world hunger” specifically, and to the problem of liberty in general.

Given the decline and impending fall of the American experiment, it would appear presently to never have been really tried anywhere (even here, even before or after The Founding, although we certainly got the closest at that time) — let alone tried on a global scale: laissez-faire capitalism.

That is, separation of economy and state, the latter required to be a small-government Constitutional Republic [1] that recognizes “the sovereignty of the individual” and “the protection of the rights of the minority” as its highest principles and requirements, and [2] more importantly, whose citizenry and leaders diligently pursue and protect those principles with unequivocal integrity and justice).

My husband read an article the other week about famine and socialism compared with famine in nations who have not had a statist government. The author said famine and socialism go hand in hand.

I haven’t been able to find what he read, but Wiki does have a summary of the theory:

The conventional explanation until 1981 for the cause of famines was the decline of food availability (abbreviated as FAD for food availability decline). The assumption was that the central cause of all famines was a decline in food availability. However this does not explain why only a certain section of the population such as the agricultural laborer was affected by famines while others were insulated from famines.

Rhodesia as a British colony was a thriving and exporter of agricultural products. When it became Zimbabwe, Mugabe and his thugs confiscated the land and drove the White owners out. Since then, it has become a financial basket case where starvation is rampant. See also South Vietnam after the Communists took over. It is freedom which produces plenty, not government.

I have not been inclined to believe that, in this country, there’s any significant number of people who want to hurt their own kind, enhance human suffering, enslave their fellow man, and roll back the quality of living. But looking back over the past, say 20 years, this conclusion is becoming hard to resist. It’s what the American enviro-left has become.

I’m also not inclined to apply the concept of evil against those who oppose my views. But if wishing to harm your fellow man and enslave him is not evil, then what is? And if it’s your ideology that “justifies” it, your ideology is evil, and you are the useful idiot.